CHAPTER IX
Bertha made her way home in a roundabout fashion to avoid the possibility of meeting any one she knew. The streets were loftily ignorant of her affairs. Thin walls dyked in affairs and happenings. Ha ha! the importance of our actions! Is it more than the kissing of the bricks?
She came out with mixed feelings; gratefulness for the enormous indifference and ignorance flowing all round us; anger and astonishment at finding herself walking away in this matter-of-fact manner; suffering at the fact that the customary street scene would not mix with the obsession of her late experience.
No doubt Nature was secret enough. But not to tell this experience of hers to anybody also would be shutting her in with Kreisler, somehow for good. She would never be able to escape the contamination of that room of his. It was one of those things that in some form one should be able to tell. She had a growing wish to make it known at once somewhere, in some shape.
That is, at bottom, she still was inclined to continue things—dreams, fancies, explanations, sacrifices. Would nothing cure her? The first feeling that this was finally the end of those things, that there was nothing further to be said or thought, was modified. She did not definitely think of telling any one—the moral was wearing off more quickly than it should. But the thought of this simple, unsensational walking away and ending up of everything in connexion with Kreisler irked her more and more. Anger revived spasmodically. Kreisler, by doing this, had made an absolute finishing with Kreisler perhaps impossible.
There was nobody now in any sense on her side, or on whose side she could range herself. Kreisler had added himself to the worrying list of her women friends, Tarr, etc., in a disgusting, dumbfounding way, the list of people preying on her mind and pushing her to perpetual fuss, all sorts of explicative, defiant, or other actions. She had stuck Kreisler up as a “cause” against her friends. In a manner of his own, he had betrayed her and placed himself beside her friends. In any case, he had carried out in the fullest fashion their estimate of him. In being virtuous a libelled man can best attack his enemies; in being “blackguardly,” awaken a warmth of sympathy in corroborating them. Kreisler had acted satanically for her friends.
She had seen Elsa and her sister twice that week, but none of the others. Ungregariousness, keeping to herself, was explained by indisposition. Sorbert was meant by this. Her continued seeing of Kreisler was known to all now, and she could imagine their reception of that news. Now she could hardly go on talking about Kreisler. This would at once be interpreted as “something having happened.” So more scandal against her name. In examining likelihoods of the future she concluded that she would have to break still more with her friends, to make up for having to retire from her Kreisler positions. To squash and counteract their satisfaction she must accentuate her independence in their direction to insult and contempt.
The last half-hour of senseless outrage still took up all the canvas. Attempts to adjust her mind to a situation containing such an element as this was difficult. What could be done with it? It took up too much space. Everything must come back and be referred to that. She wanted to tell this somewhere. This getting closed in with Kreisler—a survival, perhaps, of her vivid fear of a little time before, when he had locked the door, and she knew that resisting him would be useless—must be at all costs avoided.
Who could she tell? Clara? Madame Vannier?
Once home, she lay down and cried for some time, but without conjuring any of her trouble.
Kreisler seemed to have suddenly brought confusion everywhere. There was nothing that would quite fit in with that ridiculous, disgusting event. He had even, in the end, driven her friends out of her mind, too. She would have said nothing had one turned up then.
Having left Kreisler so simply and undramatically worried her. Something should have been done. There would have been the natural relief. But her direct human feelings of revenge had been paralysed. She thought of going back at once to his room. She could not begin life clearly again until something had been done against him, or in some way where he was.
He had been treated by her as a cypher, as something vague to put up against her friends. All along for the last week he had been a shadowy and actually unimportant figure. He had shown no consciousness of this. Rather dazed and machine-like himself, Bertha had treated him as she had found him. Suddenly, without any direct articulateness, he had revenged himself as a machine might do, in a nightmare. At a leap he was in the rigid foreground of her life. He had absorbed all the rest in an immense clashing wink. But the moment following this “desperateness” he stood, abstracted, distant and baffling as before. It was difficult to realize he was there.
Tarr had been the real central and absorbing figure all along, of course, but purposely veiled. He had been as really all-important, though to all appearance eliminated, as Kreisler had been of no importance, though propped up in the foreground. Sorbert at last could no longer be suppressed and kept from coming forward now in her mind. But his presence, too, was perplexing. She had become so used to regarding him, though seeing him daily, as an uncertain and departing figure, that now he had really gone that did not make much difference. His proceedings, a carefully prepared anæsthesia for himself, had had its effect on her as well, serving for both.
The bell rang. She stood up in one movement and stared towards the door. She looked as though she were waiting for the bell to ring two or three times to find resolution in that, one way or the other. It rang a second and third time. She did not know how much persistence would draw her to the door. But she knew that any definite show of energy would overcome her. Was it Elsa? She had lighted her lamp, and her visitor could therefore have seen that she was at home.
Bertha went to the door at length with affected alacrity, in a pretence of not having heard the bell before, and opened it sharply. Kreisler was there. The opening of the door had been like the tearing of a characterless mask off a face. Had he not been looking at her through it all the time? There did not seem room for them where they were standing. He looked to her like a great terrifying poster, cut out on the melodramatic stairway. She remained stone-still in front of him with a pinched expression, as though about to burst out crying, and something deprecating in her paralysed gesture, like a child. There was an analogy to a laugh struck dead on a child’s face at a rebuff, souring and twisting all the features.
Caricatured and enlarged to her eyes, she wanted to laugh for a moment. The surprise was complete. “What, what⸺” Her mind formed his image, rather like a man compelled to photograph a ghost. Kreisler! It was as though the world were made up of various animals, each of a different kind and physique even, and this were the animal Kreisler, whose name alone conjured up certain peculiar dangerous habits. A wild world, not of uniform men and women, but of very divergent and strangely living animals—Kreisler, Lipmann, Tarr. This man, about to speak to her again, on the same square foot of ground with her: he was not an apparition from any remote Past, but from a Past almost a Present, a half-hour old, much more startling. He had the too raw and too new colours of an image hardly digested, much less faded. When she had last seen him she had been still in the sphere of an intense agitation. His ominous and sudden appearance, so hardly out of that, seemed to swallow up the space and time in between. It was like the chilly return of a circling storm. She had imagined that it depended on her to see him or not, that he was pensive except when persistently approached. But here he was, this time, at last, following!